Iran looks to switch its official currency to toman

Iran has decided to switch its national currency back to toman, ending the reign of rial after almost 90 years.

Mohsen Hajimirzaei, secretary of the government cabinet, has said that the administration of President Hassan Rouhani in a cabinet meeting on Sunday evening approved the switch and under the new bill one toman will be worth ten rials, IRNA news agency reported.

The move is aimed at improving the performance of banking sector, he added.

Iranian officials previously had announced that switching to toman would facilitate public transactions. In the meantime, some observers had suggested that the move could boost the value of the country’s national currency against the US dollar.

Back in 2016, the governor of the central bank of Iran, Valiollah Seif, who reportedly pushed the bill through the government, said that rial had been literally removed from transactions in Iran for long as a result of rising inflation over the past decades.

Switching the country’s official currency to toman means that one zero would be removed from price figures in the country.

The bill to become a law needs to be approved by parliament and the country’s constitutional watchdog body of the Guardian Council.